LABOR: Sit-Downs Sat On

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Four days later Homer Martin, President of the United Automobile Workers, invaded New Jersey and made a speech at Newark in answer to Mr. Hoffman. He pointed out that strikes are legal. "What is the difference," he asked "if a man sits down inside or sits down outside?" The only difference he could find was that sitting down inside is easier and safer for the striker. To the argument that sit-down strikes break property laws, he argued back that the right to a good pay check is a property right just as much as the right to own property. With that argument, he advanced the sit-down debate a long way, for it put him and Governor Hoffman in agreement on one major point: that property rights are in fact one kind of human rights. Following this line of thought, the legal issue of sit-down strikes thus becomes not a conflict between human rights and property rights but a conflict between two assertions of property rights, the new and the old.

But Mr. Martin did not touch on a fundamental social issue. For while it makes little practical difference to an owner whether his plant be shut by an inside or an outside strike—either way he is in effect deprived of the use of his property. Nevertheless, a plant cannot be shut from the outside unless a substantial majority of its employes join the strike. A very small minority of employes can generally shut down a plant by a sitdown. If the sit-down should be made legal, the question would still remain whether society would tolerate having its industries shut down at will by any minority that chooses to use the weapon.